We need to see a wide view of the house from the street. We can't make curb appeal suggestions if we can't see the view from the curb :)

I would go to your garden center (not a big box) and ask for suggestions for a low spreading evergreen ground cover for those slopes. I'd put some edging around those areas and fill them up with the suggested plant.

Are you open to limbing up the trees? The branches are low and they make the area around the house look dark and cluttered. Some people like the privacy of low limbs, it depends on your preferences.

DO NOT PLANT IVY. It spreads easily six feet a year and loves to climb trees. Not good for your application.

Leave the rocks alongside the driveway but outline the driveway beside them with a plant that grows well in your planting zone. Liriope grows well in Zone 7.

You have a lot of area that appears to be covered in gravel. Would limit that "ground cover" to the one area.

See if you can find a shade tolerant grass or ground cover or even moss for other areas too shady for most grasses. You might see if red fescue would grow well in your area.

Where you have encircled lawn decorations with stone, consider burying all but the top of the stone to make it easier to mow around.

"DO NOT PLANT IVY. It spreads easily six feet a year and loves to climb trees. Not good for your application." 1 down. 29 to go. 6' is a 2X exaggeration. From the distant pictures it looks like English ivy. If it's already there, it seems silly to say don't plant it. To say don't use it when it would be the easiest, cheapest, hardest working problem-solving plant also seems a bit of a disconnect with the concept of solving problems, of which how-to-cover-lots-of-ground-in-shade is going to be the big one.

In my drawing, the darker green represents a groundcover, though not specifically English ivy, since I don't know if you live where it is a reliable groundcover. I only note that there appears what looks like it in at least one of your pictures and my answer recommending it is predicated on the fact of it already existing. It, along with many groundcovers, would definitely work to stop or limit erosion in shady areas. But when it comes to covering large areas of shade, there are not all that many groundcovers that are superior to it after all factors are considered.

In your picture, above, seems to be Pachysandra terminalis, another good shade groundcover. I don't know if it would be considered as good as English ivy for extensive areas of shade. (I've seen and managed acres of ivy, but have neither seen nor managed acres of Pachysandra. Someone else here might have experience with that amount though.)

As far as using an edge of rocks with English ivy, it would be pointless. The ivy would cover the rocks in effect negating their use. The rocks would not add to the erosion control effect beyond what the ivy could already provide on its own.

There are some inexpensive landscape apps but I don't know anything about them. I'd think that they come with lots of limitations. In some cases, they may present too steep a learning curve so as to make it not worth it for a single property. There are some apps that are good but get into more money and more learning. There is a free version of Sketchup -- 3-D modeling -- but it has the learning curve. A lot of people know it so it can't be impossible and there are tutorial videos for it on Youtube.

For me, the easiest way to visualize a landscape change is to take a picture of the area and draw over it using Microsoft Paint. It only takes basic perspective drawing skills and then becoming familiar with the drawing tools (which are well explained in the "Help" section.) However, it requires a touchscreen computer and stylus in order to use the app well. If one only has mouse or trackpad, they will only be able to use a few of the tools and produce crude drawings. I worked on a simple landscape picture once when I couldn't find my stylus and it took FOREVER!!!

It would definitely be trouble to have two groundcovers (they usually spread sideways ... ivy does for sure) abutting one another in the same bed. How would you keep them apart? (That looks like English ivy in the picture. Algerian ivy is similar, but is a more robust, more drought resistant plant as I understand it.

@longbranchstitch ... " I’m curious about the ivy comment. We live in the PNW where we battle ivy all the time ... I personally would never set out to plant it." You can't identify any use that it would serve ... covering and smoothing over rough ground? ... erosion control? ...growing where no other plants will? ....low cost per square foot of cover? ...evergreen for all-season use? Those are some of the reasons a person might want it. If none of those reasons work for you, why don't you get a serious program going that includes IVY KILLER, and get rid of it? If it's somewhat useful and you don't want to get rid of it all, why don't you consider learning to manage it? For example you complain that it grows up trees. It takes literally one minute per year to severe all the ivy growing up a single tree trunk. If you have 180 trees, that's three hours per year to solve that problem! How much time would it take to mow a lawn on which 180 trees would fit? ... maybe 50 times that amount of time and it would require an expensive machine! So the trade-off for ivy seems possibly favorable on that count. Anyway, you can evaluate whether it could be useful to you, or not, and then either get rid of it or get it under control.

@longbranchstitch ... "The pictures I attached earlier show what can happen if ivy is left to its own devices." This is not a frightening prospect to me. We've addressed how it can be remedied, if desired. But neither is it harmful to the tree other than forcing it to carry additional weight ... like we might ask of a pack horse or mule to shoulder a burden. Ivy only grows on the trunk and thickest wood but it doesn't attach to thinner branches and limbs so never covers the tree foliage, which is the main way vines hurt or kill trees. Notice also that ivy stems grow only vertical on the trunk, so they never wrap around and strangle a tree either. It's almost as if the Great Power was looking for the ideal vine to be compatible with trees and English ivy was the result.

",,, with swaths of forests where ivy has run amok." What you call running amok, I call free groundcover. The ground of most forested areas of the country where ivy doesn't run amok is covered with impenetrable weeds which don't look very handsome at all. If one prefers that look to vast swaths of ivy, then that's just what they like. Where those are my choices, I'll take the ivy because I know, as much as I'm willing to put in the effort, I can turn the area into a civilized looking landscape for very little cost.